Maemo

Nokia’s intentions toward Maemo and how the new, open-source platform fits in with their existing S60 smartphone OS have kept the rumor-mongers going for months now. Only last week, SlashGear columnist Avi Greengart asked whether the Finns should junk S60 in favor of Maemo; according to this slide from Nokia’s Capital Markets Day, the prognosis is actually worse for S40.

Nokia’s The Way We Live Next 3.0 conference was a chance to dream happily about the future of mobile devices, today the company has put its stats where its mouth is. It’s Capital Markets Day for the Finns, and while there’s plenty of talk of targeting average selling price erosion and flat market share in 2010, the most interesting stuff for the geeks among us are its aims for smartphones. Key among those is re-engineering the Symbian UI and delivering what Nokia describe as two “major product milestones”, midway through and then at the end of 2010.

Nokia have pushed Qt 4.6 out of the door, complete with support for multitouch and gestures, a new Animation Framework, and a new OpenGL paint engine. The app and UI framework also gains compatibility with a broader range of platforms, including Windows 7, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Symbian and Maemo 6. Meanwhile Maemo 5 support continues to develop, with Nokia releasing a second technology preview today.

There have been a number of rumors flying around that have to do with Nokia and the Maemo operating system that is based on Linux. The rumors have Nokia moving to Maemo rather than Symbian for its high-end smartphones. Nokia has said that statement was premature in the past.

Nokia has a problem: it is both the largest handset vendor in the world, by a significant margin, and the largest smartphone vendor in the world – again, by a significant margin. Yet it has never managed to crack the U.S. smartphone market, and it has begun losing market share even in its European strongholds, primarily to Apple, though RIM, Samsung, and HTC are also threats. Nokia admits that it was caught sleeping while Apple first redefined the mobile user experience with the iPhone, and then again when Apple reenergized app development with the App Store. Nokia’s initial response has been lackluster: adapting its existing Symbian S60 OS to support touch, applying that to a few phones (the 5800 and the N97), and stumbling in its initial launch of the Ovi Store.

Oh dear, it looks like someone in the Maemo marketing team had a few too many drinks last night and said something they shouldn’t have. Having heard earlier on today that Nokia were planning to ditch Symbian on their Nseries devices by 2012, the Finnish company has now issued a statement calling any such speculation “completely premature”. Symbian, they say, is about “bringing smartphones to the masses”, while Maemo is targeted at “devices based on technology that you’d typically find inside a desktop computer”.

Maemo – as on the Nokia N900 – is still more of a geek’s paradise than a consumer-ready platform, so we hope the development team responsible for it will be working hard over the next couple of years. That’s because the Maemo marketing team have let slip that, as of 2012, Maemo will replace Symbian as the OS for Nokia’s entire Nseries range of handsets.

Nokia's various open-source teams are well on their way to being the flirting teases of the mobile OS world; after last week's Symbian Foundation demo video, showing a nifty amalgam of augmented reality, geo-location services and combined social network streams, head of Maemo marketing Peter Schneider took to the stage at Nokia's The Way We Live Next 3.0 event to discuss his team's vision of "contagious content". According to Schneider, one day our mobile devices will be able to spot hot topics of information - whether they be Twitter messages, photos or something else - nearby to us, and flag them up to better involve us.

SlashGear is at Nokia’s The Way We Live Next 3.0 conference in Helsinki, Finland this week, and the company has just confirmed that the much-anticipated Nokia N900 Maemo smartphone will be shipping today. We’ve been told that the handset – which has a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen and slide-out QWERTY keyboard – went out from Nokia’s production facilities over the weekend, with shipments of the handset beginning in Europe, the Middle East, Russia and North America.

Nokia's N900 is already enticing developers, but right now there's not the same compelling catalog of applications as you might find, say, in the iPhone's App Store. Happily that just leaves room for Maemo coders to fill with their own apps, such as a homebrew open-source Spotify application.

Having dithered around its release date like a forgetful felon, the Nokia N900 looks to have finally been granted a more or less official launch window. According to the official US Nokia store, the N900 will begin shipping at the "end of October 2009"; that tallies with what Amazon UK were saying back at the end of September (October 26th), but the mega-retailer has now changed its tune.

We're inherently sceptical of anything blurry that's claiming to be a prototype, so throw some salt over your shoulder and take a look at what's tipped as Nokia's next-gen N9xx-series Internet Tablet device. According to imobile365 the Nokia N920 will be a touchscreen-only device, using a 4.13-inch capacitive touchscreen rather than the N900's 3.5-inch resistive panel and supporting multitouch gestures on Maemo 6.